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Members’ Publications 2024/2025

Industrial Memory in North-East England: Negotiating Northernness

Victoria Allen

Industrial memory in North-East England examines how the region’s industrial myth and memory have been articulated in the renegotiation of northernness. The book offers a critical contextualisation of the concept of northernness and the English North, and introduces the concept of the Pop Cultural Portfolio, a mixed-methods approach to conjunctural analysis in cultural and memory studies. The book provides six richly illustrated case studies to demonstrate the practical application of cultural studies’ expansive and inclusive understanding of texts, bringing together materials from North East football, folk, indie and exhibition culture to establish how the North East’s industrial past continues to be remembered and functionalised as industrial memory. In turn, the conjunctural analysis demonstrates how industrial memory is articulated and mythologised as north(east)erness in contemporary popular culture.

Dem Tode zum Trotz: Unsterblichkeit und Wiedergeburt in der Phantastik / Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic

Kristin Aubel, Maria Fleischhack, Marion Gymnich, Carsten Kullmann and Aylin Dilek Walder (editors)

Unter dem Titel „Dem Tode zum Trotz: Unsterblichkeit und Wiedergeburt in der Phantastik“ widmete sich die Inklings-Gesellschaft vom 29. April bis 1. Mai 2023 an der Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg den zahlreichen Schnittmengen dieser Themen und der Phantastik. […] Solche Schwerpunkte lassen sich häufig in den Werken der Oxforder Inklings identifizieren – man denke etwa an Valinor oder Aslans Land als Orte der Unsterblichkeit – doch die hier versammelten Beiträge widmen sich neben den Schriften der Inklings auch Werken der zeitgenössischen Phantastik. Das Jahrbuch beginnt mit Abhandlungen zu Tolkien und Lewis und erweitert dann den Spielraum, in dem die Themen des Symposiums behandelt wurden.

Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality

Sarah Faber and Kerstin-Anja Münderlein (editors)

From early examples of queer representation in mainstream media to present-day dissolutions of the human-nature boundary, the Gothic is always concerned with delineating and transgressing the norms that regulate society and speak to our collective fears and anxieties. This volume examines British and American Gothic texts from four centuries and diverse media – including novels, films, podcasts, and games – in case studies which outline the central relationship between the Gothic and transgression, particularly gender(ed) and sexual transgression. This relationship is both crucial and constantly shifting, ever in the process of renegotiation, as transgression defines the Gothic and society redefinestransgression. The case studies draw on a combination of well-studied and under-studied texts in order to arrive at a more comprehensive picture of transgression in the Gothic.

Fan Podcasts: Rewatch, Recap, Review

Anne Korfmacher

Starting from the observation of the ubiquity of fan podcasts engaging in media commentary, this book explores three fan podcast genres in which commentary manifests as a structuring form: rewatch and reread podcasts, recap podcasts, and review podcasts. The author conducts a formalist genre analysis of these podcasts, close reading nine case studies to describe how the three genres function and how different fan labour manifests in podcasting. Each case study teases out the themes, style, and formal constellations of thethree podcast genres, shows how different fans activate the affordances of podcasting and commentary, and reveals the distinct generic functions of the three podcast genres.

The Tauchnitz Edition and Related Paperback Series: English Literature in YourPocket

Melanie Mienert, Stefan Welz and Dietmar Böhnke (editors)

The Tauchnitz Edition and Related Paperback Series: English Literature in Your Pocket unites a broad variety of interests and different perspectives concerning the legacy of the Tauchnitz Edition in particular and English-language paperback series in general. It provides an international and interdisciplinary approach to the ‘paperback revolution’ as part of media culture throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. […] The Leipzig-based Tauchnitz publishers, renowned all over the world for their series of affordable pocketbooks in English, produced more than 5000 volumes within the course of over 100 years. Cultural and literary repercussions of this unique achievement have been far-reaching since the late 19th century. […] Still in present times, the Tauchnitz Edition and its successors are stimulating both academic research in various fields and the enthusiasm of collectors and readers.

Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities: Proceedings of the EighthCaptivating Criminality Conference

Kerstin-Anja Münderlein (editor)

The present volume is a collection of select papers presented at „Captivating Criminality 8: Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities“ (Bamberg, July 2022), the eighth annual conference of the International Crime Fiction Association. As gender and crime fiction is a popular topic with researchers from all areas of (world) crime fiction and the contributionsranging from the highly popularised Victorian Jack the Ripper case to contemporarydomestic noir novels written by authors such as Gillian Flynn, this book covers crimefiction studies from a broad variety of angles. The chapters in this book cover texts from all over the world in a joint effort to show that crime fiction (studies) is omnipresent, diverse, and – above all – topical and that gender is one of the mainstays of the genre and a determinant of its topicality and diversity.

Feminist Perspectives on Law and Literature

Laura Schmitz-Justen, Laura A. Zander, Hanna Luise Kroll and Laura Wittmann (editors)

Bringing together more than twenty international researchers from related disciplines, thisvolume is the first to bring questions of intersectional feminism to the forefront of law and literature scholarship. From reproductive and (trans-)gender justice in law and literature to feminist practices that intervene in judicial discourse, this volume brings into focus a wide range of cultural and legal phenomena in which gender and the law intersect in literary texts. The volume’s commitment to intersectionality fittingly extents to its very make up: the contributors were selected to represent a diverse range of positions in terms of their gender, career stage and nationality.

Narrating Empire and Domesticity in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Domestic Elsewheres

Marlena Tronicke

Systematic re-readings of empire have so far played a comparatively minor role in neo-Victorian scholarly debate. This monograph addresses this lacuna by examining how neo-Victorianism negotiates constructions of empire in conjunction with the domestic. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels as well as their Victorian intertexts and bringing these into dialogue with postcolonial theory, it asks how neo-Victorian fiction engages with, perpetuates, or subverts Victorian imaginaries of urban British ‘centres’ in opposition to remote imperial ‘margins.’ It examines why domesticity – broadly understood asideologically charged concepts of family, home, and belonging based on formations ofgender, sexuality, and class – can never be constituted independently of empire. In addition, the book raises questions regarding neo-Victorianism’s larger potentiality of narrating empire, suggesting that it is precisely the disorienting moments that constitute a characteristically neo-Victorian mode of exploring the entanglements of empire and domesticity.

Lecturing Women in British Fiction, Periodicals and Public Orality, 1870-1910: The First Speech

Anne-Julia Zwierlein

This book examines the emergence of women as audiences and speakers on the British metropolitan lecture circuit and in mass print representations from 1870 to 1910. Bringing together research on Victorian lecturing, periodicals, voice studies and the cultural history of feminism, it sheds new light on the interdependence of orality and print and the rise of the British women’s movement. […] Undertaking an archaeology of women’s presence in the lecture hall, it explores conservative fantasies in fiction of the female speaking automaton alongside new writings that transformed women orators from objects of sensation into public agents. By analysing women’s collective self-education in rhetoric and elocution, this book traces the emergence in political fictions of key narrative tropes of oral performance: the surprise encounter in the lecture hall, the moment of conversion during a lecture and the symbolic ‘first speech’ of new suffrage recruits.

Categories
BritCult History

Position paper on the situation of mid-level faculty

During the 2024 conference in Innsbruck, the General Assembly adopted the following position paper on strengthening mid-level academic staff.

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Postgraduate Forum

Postgraduate Forum 2025

Date: 20 November 2025
Place: University of Bamberg
Deadline: 6 June 2025

To prepare your paper for the postgraduate forum, please refer to the general guidelines for presentations (last updated 2017).

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BritCult Award

BritCult Award 2025

Deadline: 15 April 2025
Eligible: works reviewed (second book: published or accepted for publication) within 24 months prior to the deadline

Please also refer to the selection criteria for the award (last updated 2025, also available in German).

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Conferences

BritCult 2025: Re-Orientating Gender (Studies): Feminism, Queerness, Trans* in Cultural Studies Today

2025 conference of the German Association for the Study of British Cultures (BritCult), including its members’ assembly. Programme and registration details can be found on the conference website.

BritCult members can apply for bursaries to cover travel and accommodation.

Date: 20–22 November 2025
Place: University of Bamberg
Deadline: 19 March 2025

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Graduate and Postgraduate Workshops

Workshop 2025: Assessing Illness and Health through Cultural Studies

Date: 9–10 May 2025
Place: University of Hamburg

Please note that BritCult members can apply for bursaries to cover travel and accommodation.

Categories
JSBC Calls for Contributions

Crime (Fictions) and Nostalgia in British Culture

Issue: 33.2 (2026)
Editor: Kerstin-Anja Münderlein
Abstract deadline: 1 April 2025

Categories
Postgraduate Forum

Postgraduate Forum 2024

Date: 21 November 2024
Place: University of Innsbruck
Deadline: 23 June 2024

To prepare your paper for the postgraduate forum, please refer to the general guidelines for presentations (last updated 2017).

Categories
Graduate and Postgraduate Workshops

Workshop 2024: Cultural Studies: The Role and Relevance of History

Date: 3–4 May 2024
Place: Bielefeld University

Please note that BritCult members can apply for bursaries to cover travel and accommodation.

Categories
JSBC Calls for Contributions

British Marxism and Cultural Studies Today

Issue: 32.2 (2025)
Editors: Sebastian Berg, Claus-Ulrich Viol
Abstract deadline: 17 July 2024